Nestled in the Sangre de Cristo mountains, Crestone is a retreat from the world-at-large. Nearly every flavour of spirituality turns up here, but whether it's a Buddhist peace or a Christian-monestary kind of peace, it's restful. Do visit the Cambodian restaurant, stay at the hostel, climb up the ziggurat, and hike to a stupa. And, by all means, stop off at Valley View Hot Springs for natural bathing with a glorious view of the entire mountain range. For more information about Crestone, read the field notes below.

field notes: crestone, colorado

do you ever look at the mess of your life and say, wow, this really isn't working out for me, so you throw your sleeping bag into your car along with some quinoa, two carrots, a grapefruit, AND a grapefruit spoon, and drive out into the mountains?

well, i went adventuring, and i found a beacon of hope in the dark night of our ailing planet (to put it melodramatically). have you all ever heard of crestone, colorado? i found it kinda by accident. i'm not a cold-weather person, so i thought it would be best to stay the night in a hostel, so i drove out to this town called crestone... in the sangre de cristo mountains, way south of here, all sagebrush and deserty.

i pulled up to the hostel, which seemed like it was in some really strange spread-out subdivision. it was this beautiful building, with a truck parked outside that said "Powered by Veggy Oil", and a cat watching me from the window.Š there was a phone outside that said call such-and-such number to reach us, so i called it, and the people told me where the key was to get in.

now technically this was a hostel, but i was the only one there, and basically just staying at these people's house. and they had just give a person they'd never met the key to their house. talk about implicit trust! it was a beautiful place, with tapestries and lord of the rings posters, airy, green growing plants everywhere. quite possibly the best hostel i've ever been to, except for the weird feeling like i was crashing at a stranger's house.

There was a fireplace and a cat curled in my lap and I decided happiness was a fire and a cat (separate, not together).

Anyway, I'm way off track trying to describe Crestone-- I was just wanting to make the point of the homeyness and implicit trust I found, because it shocked me in a most pleasing way.

I w|ent into the town (which apparently has 75 people or so in it, technically)... there's an artist's co-op, a gas station / general store, and the Shambhala coffee shop, where I got curry made by a Cambodian woman, and there I learned more about the strangeness of the whole place.

Apparently Crestone was practically a ghost-town until the 1970s, when this Canadian businessman (an oil-lord from Alberta, I understand!?) and his Danish wife, Maurice and Hanne Strong, bought this huge tract of land right next to it. Maurice was one of the people who helped create the Earth Summit in Rio back in 1992, and also apparently wrote the foreward to a Trilateral Commission book on environmental problems (?) (if none of this means anything to you, just skip over it...) anyway, Hanne had a spiritual vision about the place, and they have granted huge tracts of land to all kinds of spiritual and {ecological foundations, according to her vision.

this explains the map i got of the place. you know how different cities put out free maps, with advertisments on them from local businesses? well this one, it features a crazy network of roads, and then little labels at different points along the roads: Yeshe Khorlo. Haidakhandi Universal Ashram. Atalanta. Village Witch. I Am Harmony. Stone Huts. Shinji Shumeiki. Ziggurat. Sanctuary House.

what would you do if somebody gave you a map like that? i couldn't wait for morning to come, so i could explore all this weirdness. it was like a treasure map to me... my imagination activated by the dark mountains...

because at night, in sparse places like that, everything seems so much colder and blacker. maybe you know. and the stars... you can see swaths of galaxies, maybe, i don't know... I can't explain about the mountains, either, you ¬øhave to see it, later i'll upload pictures.

okay: longwindedness. that's what happens when you compress a lot of living into a single day or two. So, the next day i head out on this crazy network of dirt roads that form the Baca Grants, the tract of land that the Strong's donated... and there's hardly any signs, just these desert roads, and these crazy structures.

i don't know if you all follow sustainable building at all, but every so often there would just be these ramshackle palaces: straw bale rammed earth adobe-plastered geodesic domes boasting brilliant solar panels and the like... i've never seen so many creative, strange self-build houses in my life. and it's the perfect place for it: though most of them i guess are self-supporting, there seems to be underground power infrastructure even out there in the desert, and sewer too i'd guess; also no building codes at all. basically it was like a permanent, spread-out rainbow gathering by people who knew what they were doing.

that's the point i want to make: these people are doing it, out there at the foot of the mountains. i knew there had to be people doing it somewhere... so i was driving around, wondering what i was missing, and then i remembered reading something:

the whole thing sits on a massive aquifer.

i was just staggered by that. those people are going to survive. they never say that's their stated intent, maybe it isn't so stated, but they will, & it'll be beautiful... i mean there's nothing around there for miles, nothing. the whole valley has a strangeness to it; no wonder there's so many UFO sightings; strange and desolate but filled with life, nevertheless...

i want to tell about the ziggurat i climbed, and the beautiful tibetan stupa i hiked to, and the wonderful solitary nudist hot springs in the january cold, and the tibetan prayer park, and the magick shoppe of the village witch, and the apple pie just out of the oven made from orchard apples... but it's all too much, go see it.

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